I don't think Tumblr was particularly influential on the neighbors aspect. It never reached that kind of broad base. Twitter did though. Unless you just mean social media broadly?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49481105

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49434709

Points: 64

# Comments: 20

The flip side is people who get and stay too far into the weeds. Solving little problems here and there is a great way to keep your finger on the pulse of what's actually going on.

But if you get totally bogged down in details, you are probably avoiding your leadership responsibilities. You should be observing the structural or strategic opportunities, and then dragging the org(s) in that direction.

Sometimes you do that by writing some code to prove a point, other times you do it by getting the nearest VP to take something on as a commitment. For me, personally, I find that the style of work waxes and wanes. Sometimes I get almost no code committed in a month :(. Other times, I get to go off and do some work that nobody else would have done.

I prefer the latter, but I respect that my job requires the former. Many of the people who you see spending all their time talking believe that's the most responsible use of their time. They might not personally prefer it!

It is too bad that people aren't more direct about this. But if folks remember Meta/FB's attempt at saying they did performance-based cuts, people ripped into them for labeling all the fired personnel as un-hireable. Earnings calls are heavy lawyered and regulated, so there's no reason to say anything.

The challenge is minimizing the cost of (selectively) rebuilding.

If he'd said: "We all need to learn to be like Linus", would that have changed your take?

It's clear he's very respectful not only of Linus, but of all the people involved as well. He's instead using Linus's transition from full-time writing software to full-time "leading" as the point of his write up. Don't get hung up on the verbiage.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48823697

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

It still could be better for students, but it's not obvious that it would be (or maybe not as strongly?).

I'm curious how well you feel this worked because the subject was Statistics (objective grading) versus something more subjective like Civics or Literature.

PS - I'd say this qualifies for Show HN, too!

Do you

> One such bug was in the sign function for zigzag decoding of the datrs/varinteger library. On input Std.U64.MAX, the expression (value + 1) overflowed, causing crashes in debug mode and silent corruption in release mode—an edge case that testing and fuzzing would typically miss.

In what way would this boundary condition case be considered something that "testing [...] would typically miss"? It's certainly something that bad tests would miss or not think about, but I find that (a) careful people and (b) ML coding systems are actually really good at "oh, I should test the extreme values". Especially for things that parse user input.

I'm curious if they found other bugs that were more interesting, but found them too hard to explain quickly.

> Some of the newly added features may come as a surprise to those of you who keep a close track of ZLUDA development. Most of them were previously explicitly outside ZLUDA's roadmap. There has been a change of plans. ZLUDA development is no longer commercially funded, so it's back to being my weekend project. This means that the priority is no longer what makes commercial sense, but what I find the most entertaining. That's why the sudden addition of textures, PhysX and better Windows support.

Outside of the time commitment that full-time support would offer, I generally think focusing on amusement is a good life strategy.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48492304

Points: 208

# Comments: 525

But none of it was surprising. The original RenderMan shading language was "vectorized" and it even used SIMD instructions on modern processors to run the "interpreter loops". That is, a single "color add" in RSL might have looked like:

  for (int i=0; i < grid_points; i++) {
    out_color[i] += foo;
  }

The point of ISPC et al. was to give people CUDA-like easy mode for "trust me, just vectorize the whole thing and deal with the masking for me". It goes beyond a hardcoded shading language (easier target!) though didn't reach as far as CUDA with complex structs / C++ capabilities.